How to handle high-risk orders leading to numerous chargebacks?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
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Topic summary

A Shopify merchant experienced a coordinated fraud attack starting June 2nd, receiving numerous high-risk orders with Chinese names shipping to a single freight forwarding address in Portland, Oregon (6215 NE 92nd Dr, 97253). After fulfilling these orders without proper verification, the merchant faced 40 chargebacks totaling approximately $12,000 in losses.

Key Fraudulent Addresses Identified:

  • 6215 NE 92nd Dr, Portland OR 97253
  • 8344 Northwest 66th Street, Miami FL 33166
  • 131 Rosemary Rd, Suite 202, Dover DE 19901

Multiple merchants confirmed similar fraud attempts using these same addresses, often under names like “Wang Hai” or “Andy Xue.”

Resolution & Preventive Measures:

  • Shopify’s Safety and Trust team helped restore the merchant’s held payments after verification
  • Merchant installed NoFraud Fraud Protection with auto-cancel for high-risk orders
  • Community recommends immediately canceling orders to freight forwarders/logistics companies
  • Suggested verification steps include requesting ID, selfie, last 4 card digits, or billing address confirmation before fulfillment
  • Manual payment capture allows review before funds are processed

Ongoing Challenge:
Legitimate international buyers using freight forwarders face order cancellations due to widespread abuse. The discussion remains active with merchants sharing new fraudulent address variations and prevention strategies.

Summarized with AI on October 27. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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I’m sorry to hear that, it’s really frustrating how chargebacks work, almost always gets sided with the customer, even when they’re clearly scamming.

I think every store I’ve worked with that does volume gets chargebacks, it’s part of online business, so it’s not abnormal to get some chargebacks.

I found this from Shopify documentation that they may suspend your payments account if “too many” - https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/chargebacks.

I don’t know how many is too many but if you’re worried about it you could try contacting them, to be proactive about it.

Moving forward, couple of tips:

  • For all high risk orders do a check with customer support (ask for identification and even a selfie if you want to be extra vigilant, and include in the email a basic agreement that they will not file a chargeback, that may help you win the case if they do).

Just explain to the customer that you’ve been the victim of scams lately, you don’t save the information, this is just a security measure.

  • If it’s not a high risk order, you’ll want to then identify the type of buyer (like same address like you said) and cancel their orders. If you’re doing low volume and check every order then just cancel the order. If you don’t want to manually check, Order Automator can identify orders based on data like this, and notify your support staff (or even auto cancel if you want). There’s also a free version of Order Automator that includes a Fraud Guard, to alert staff or cancel high / medium risk orders. That could help you stay on top of those type of orders easier.

Good luck, I hope you’re able to stop the scams happening to you.

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